The Young Turks

For all that moveon.org and the like do, they've left people feeling like they are the united nations, because how much power do they have in the end if that power isn't translated into some real world effect. People got so frustrated with Bush that they flocked to sites like Moveon, to be part of a real movement with real change, and they got it in the sweeping mid-terms.

Now there is a lot of impotent rage, a lot of frustration. If you look back at the baby boomers, they went from mickey mouse club in the 50's to Timothy Leary and LSD in the sixties and then there was a lot of disillusionment in the so-called me-generation 70's, a reaction to the love all 60's. In other words, fuck it, if you pull back the rock and find all the Nixonite slugs, and all the peace and love looks like there is no reality for the dream, well then fuck it I'm gonna go for mine. In a sort of weird twisted way, the selfish nature of got-to-make-myself-happy first had a certain sort of pay-off by which some of that utopian dream of the 60's lived on, but the chemical happiness was no longer as tied to as many romantic and esoteric ideals. However it was now a world wide movement and you had the likes of Led Zeppelin reviving the "Lord of the Rings" and other bohemian works of fancy, trying to reconcile Wordsworth like landscapes with urban decay, and finding a middle ground in new forms of dress, speech and song, which borrowed as much from Oscar Wilde as Jerry Garcia.

The point was it may not have all been outright political, but the politics of the day shaped much of what happened, a lot of it a reaction to Nixon. And since it was outside the realm of politics, the fashion, the music, it was less controlled by the politics of the day. And so it wasn't as easy to control, to stop, to categorize and box in and label. But all creative expression is at some point denigrated and categorized. The hippies and the love children and the heads, they were just as or more derided than Moveon.org by the establishment.

But what happened to most of the hippies who became frustrated with the system and disillusioned by it, who were derided by it, they became it, they bought into it, and not in a radical way but a fairly normal and orderly way too, they helped Reagan and the morning in America movement put ideas like defense, image before substance, nimby, gentrification, racism and greed is good back into office. They just went from being yippies to yuppies.

So what I'm worried about when I hear the frustration you're speaking about, when I feel the visceral quality of your hatred for Bush, when I listen to this I don't think you're a lone angry voice, it sounds to me like you are speaking for a pretty big chunk of the disenfranchised, maybe a twenty percent block of independent voters, albeit not under one flag. And what really worries me is that eventually this anger, if it isn't channeled, if it doesn't really shake things up, will maybe eventually figure, if we can't beat 'em join 'em. Never say never, history tends to repeat itself. 

Eventually the world will turn on its head, moveon.org, the web, the twenty percent block of indies, techno, ambient and electronica, non mainstream press, green party and environmental idealists, and God forbid, maybe even TYT will become the establishment. This doesn't mean we are going to get rid of Hollywood, TV, the movies, probably not even the mpaa and the recording industry as we know it, but it does mean that the zany outside the box wingnuts, the stuff nobody wants to touch, will become the established voice of reason everyone knows is true, it always happens this way. In the process of these ideas becoming the establishment, how will they change? What happens to the anger and the hatred, much of which are driving fuels.

George Bush has done more for the environmental and green party movements in this country than Al Gore could have done in 100 years as president. Nothing confirms so much as a complete denial. Witness the videotape scandal. Trust me, trust me, there was nothing on there that was wrong and that you could'nt be allowed to see, we have nothing to hide, we destroyed it because there wasn't anything you needed to see and you can't see it because we destroyed it. End of story, have a nice day, as KenTX would say. Thank you very much.

But in the process of the Green party becoming mainstream, it is all about percentages and dollars and numbers and spreadsheets and legality and taxes, and not at all about fairies and sex goddesses and imagining and dreaming and music and laughing and shrooms, which is what it was about for many for a long time and what it is still about on the fringe. It's funny because it is a lot of that fringe energy, the stuff on the edge, the dreaming and imagining that led to this zany world of carbon tax trade offs and coal plant upgrades.